THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE LUNG 27S daily symptoms to daily levels of air pollutants, and 2) to act as a surveillance tool for acute respiratory illness (AR!). The ARIs were detected with the aid of the daily diaries and when a child was detected with an AR! he/she was called to the clinic for direct observation. If it was a true AR!, pulmonary function tests were conducted twice during the sympto...

OBJECTIVE A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental pollutants, such as heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants and plasticizers play an important role in the development of chronic diseases. Most epidemiologic studies have examined environmental pollutants individually, but in real life, we are exposed to multi-pollutants and pollution mixtures, not single pollutants. Although...

The development of careful quality assurance criteria assuring freedom from contamination in all aspects of sample recovery has opened the window to studies of a fascinating new microbial biome in the deep subsurface. Organisms have been recovered with unusual metabolic capabilities and a chemosynthetic lifestyle independent of the recent surface photosynthetically derived energy inputs. The pr...

With the economic development of China, air pollutants are also growing rapidly in recent decades, especially in big cities of the country. To understand the relationship between economic condition and air pollutants in big cities, we analysed the socioeconomic indictors such as Gross Regional Product per capita (GRP per capita), the concentration of air pollutants (PM10, SO2, NO2) and the air ...